Show off your old and retro computer parts

[ApolloX75]

3 hours ago, Bitter said:

Sounds about right. Since the BIOS on Polaris isn't locked there's a lot of room to play around with them and Power Play Tables work with them as well for setting power targets, overclocks, fan speeds, etc that persist through reboots without software running in the background. 580's are still pretty competent cards and can be pretty efficient when undervolted, for sure look into that! You can likely get a solid 10-maybe 20% more out of them by dropping the gpu core volts a bit to allow them to boost higher and hold the boost without hitting thermal and power limits.

Since they were former mining cards it's going to be a good idea long term to go through them and repad/repaste. Are they the full die or the 2048?

Full die cards. I went through the coolers, cleaned them, put in new quality pads, thermal paste and changed the fans out too as one was noisy. Did both just to be sure.

 

Even at their basic clocks they work quite well, very quick for their age. I will probably tune them up a bit more, but honestly I'm just glad they work at this point lol.

[Bitter]

48 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

Full die cards. I went through the coolers, cleaned them, put in new quality pads, thermal paste and changed the fans out too as one was noisy. Did both just to be sure.

 

Even at their basic clocks they work quite well, very quick for their age. I will probably tune them up a bit more, but honestly I'm just glad they work at this point lol.

I have a Red Devil RX 580 8GB that's dual BIOS, flashed one for mining, left one alone. Honestly not much different between quiet and OC besides fan curves. I need to get back at it and put it to stock again. Anyway, I could push around 250W through that card when tuned up properly and matched the performance of between a 1070 and a 1070TI. Was able to pretty much hit the "Golden Sample" edition clock speeds. Not everything scaled with OC on the core, for sure some needed more memory bandwidth. All in all well worth the $120 I paid for it way back and they're still well worth that price for upper end models like from Sapphire or PowerColor. 

[Dabombinable]

9 hours ago, Quebber said:

I know its computer parts but

My retro side of the room is now complete.

4k 65" Tv

Xbox original  recapped with cerbios firmware, 128mb mem upgrade and 2TB hard drive (original Xbox had 30gb)

Amiga 500 recapped and black keys with usb flash drive for games.

PS3

PS2

Binatone Master System MK 6  1976 my first console. 

All still working.

 

I've got so many OG Xbox to recap. Except my first one as my mum always made me unplug it after playing games. Did you by the Xbox modded? Because mine either had an 8GB WD or 10GB Seagate, which were the only options.

Her own Xbox now with red lightning stickers however has a very custom mod. A standard BIOS chip flashed with a modded version of the original firmware, wired in and completely bypassing the original chip. The version of Evox it had installed however was that buggy, I thought the HDD was completely broken.

[da na]

Been a while since I posted something substantial here so here we go!

Recently repasted and cleaned my Latitude D531, similar to the D530 but on an AMD platform instead of Core 2 Duo. The Turion 64 chips are Athlon 64 architecture based and have quite long dies. The Turion chips perform similarly to a Core 2 Duo of 400mhz lower core clock.

Personally the most interesting aspect of the machine for me is the Hynix ram module soldered to the motherboard below the chipset and above that big ribbon cable. This is part of the VRAM. It is a 256mb chip of which the GPU can directly access 160mb, the rest of this memory is used for streaming memory in and out of system memory for the GPU to use. This combination of discrete SRAM and shared memory benefits the GPU in speed since it still has its own memory, but allows lower cost higher capacity VRAM. If the GPU in the chipset, Xpress 1270, didnt suck, it would be interesting to use.

[Bitter]

I gotta say, laptops have gotten A LOT easier to work on lately! Having worked on my Dell 3590 and now a 5590 vs the older Inspiron 15R and a couple other Dell of similar vintage or older...it's all on one board with everything facing one direction, down. The 15R needs the keyboard out to get a the hard drive...which means taking the back panel off to take out screws for the keyboard. The 3590 and 5590 just pop the back panel off and it's all there, memory, CPU heat sink, disc, power adapter board, wifi module, etc. Finally they've made something easier to work on!

[ApolloX75]

I bought a hot air soldering station. I'm jumping down the rabbit hole. I also ordered two LGA775 sockets and a 1366 socket.

 

I am currently cleaning and solder braiding the EVGA X58 Classified now that I've brutally removed it's socket. I'm determined to get that board running again. I also have started to pull the socket off the Striker II with the broken pins. I will get that one running too.

 

If I am successful at this, it will open up a whole new round of possibilities. Sockets are dirt friggin' cheap from Aliexpress and even eBay, and boards with broken pins are all over the place.

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, ApolloX75 said:

I bought a hot air soldering station. I'm jumping down the rabbit hole. I also ordered two LGA775 sockets and a 1366 socket.

 

I am currently cleaning and solder braiding the EVGA X58 Classified now that I've brutally removed it's socket. I'm determined to get that board running again. I also have started to pull the socket off the Striker II with the broken pins. I will get that one running too.

 

If I am successful at this, it will open up a whole new round of possibilities. Sockets are dirt friggin' cheap from Aliexpress and even eBay, and boards with broken pins are all over the place.

That's a good place to start, but from what I've seen what you really need is a soldering hot plate to do larger items like sockets. I've seen some people get away with literally a hot plate and a lug of metal between the plate and board to heat just under the socket, seems to work along with a hot air gun. The area that needs heating is often just too big when you account for the traces pulling heat away for hot air alone.

[ApolloX75]

5 hours ago, Bitter said:

That's a good place to start, but from what I've seen what you really need is a soldering hot plate to do larger items like sockets. I've seen some people get away with literally a hot plate and a lug of metal between the plate and board to heat just under the socket, seems to work along with a hot air gun. The area that needs heating is often just too big when you account for the traces pulling heat away for hot air alone.

I agree! I have a hot plate coming actually. I'm going to be modifying a desk in my basement and making a new station.

[Dabombinable]

I'll be putting the set of 128MB sticks back in (can't use third slot anymore). But I now have a (excluding the 10GB and 20GB HDD as well the 145W FSP PSU from a Packard Bell) year perfect PC, with the vast majority of parts being original (more so when I dismantle both PII and swap heatsinks). The coolers fan is temperature controlled via an integrated thermistor BTW:
 

Spoiler

 

[Bitter]

OH, off topic but all the talk about the RX580 and I forgot to bring up Vega! Vega56's and some 64's are also rapidly dropping in price and are an excellent choice too. They're even more efficient than Polaris when tuned up and undervolted. Vega56's usually run between a 1070/1070ti for gaming and a 1080/1080ti in productivity. I've been really happy with mine I bought about 3 or 4 years ago to replace a RX580.

[ApolloX75]

28 minutes ago, Bitter said:

OH, off topic but all the talk about the RX580 and I forgot to bring up Vega! Vega56's and some 64's are also rapidly dropping in price and are an excellent choice too. They're even more efficient than Polaris when tuned up and undervolted. Vega56's usually run between a 1070/1070ti for gaming and a 1080/1080ti in productivity. I've been really happy with mine I bought about 3 or 4 years ago to replace a RX580.

I've been watching those for ages. They are slowly dropping, I agree. I will get one eventually.

[Bitter]

12 hours ago, ApolloX75 said:

I've been watching those for ages. They are slowly dropping, I agree. I will get one eventually.

Excellent. There's good ones and there's better ones. Ideally you want Samsung HBM2 and a filled die, but even the lesser Hynix is still a good card. Samsung memory will OC to Vega 64 speeds and perform rather close to one in many games. I believe all the 'base model' cards are Samsung memory but not 100% on that. My top of the crop Sapphire Nitro+ LE is a Hynix card sadly but it runs so cool I can OC the core enough to close the gap pretty good. 1650mhz for gaming with 850mhz memory is stable.

[SimplyChunk]

Thought this was quite interesting

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Going ahead and bumping @da na's thread here in case somebody from this specific thread can help:

 

[da na]

12 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Going ahead and bumping @da na's thread here in case somebody from this specific thread can help:

 

Thanks!

I went ahead and opened it up

 

and I was able to tune a pot that at least stretched the image to the edge of the screen correctly. However, still odd image issue.

My assumption at this point is that whatever VGA sync signal an Intel GMA graphics chip hands out is incompatible with the standard this monitor accepts, it being 33 years old. It works fine in the BIOS on any older non graphical bios computer, such as my Packard Bell 486 or even Gigabyte AM2+ board

[Dabombinable]

6 hours ago, da na said:

Thanks!

I went ahead and opened it up

 

and I was able to tune a pot that at least stretched the image to the edge of the screen correctly. However, still odd image issue.

My assumption at this point is that whatever VGA sync signal an Intel GMA graphics chip hands out is incompatible with the standard this monitor accepts, it being 33 years old. It works fine in the BIOS on any older non graphical bios computer, such as my Packard Bell 486 or even Gigabyte AM2+ board

It is quite possible that it is a driver issue, since the screen is OK in the BIOS and on older graphics chips. My SiS 315 and 315E (ECS and Apollo manufactured) spaz out with my 1024x768 85Hz LCD and 1440p screen, ending up being completely unusable once past the post screen with only NT based versions of Windows (even NT 4.0). Every other card of mine has no issues. 

[theRatty]

dell latitude d610, fully updated drivers, great for ancient games 

[JJsuperdude38]

One thing about being a teenager in a small town is that word gets around that your getting into tech and everyone gives you their old stuff.

 

1x DDR1 512mb RAM

2x AGP Gpu's

2x PCI Wifi Cards

1x Ethernet Card

1x IDE 2.5" HDD

[Dabombinable]

5 minutes ago, JJsuperdude38 said:

One thing about being a teenager in a small town is that word gets around that your getting into tech and everyone gives you their old stuff.

 

1x DDR1 512mb RAM

2x AGP Gpu's

2x PCI Wifi Cards

1x Ethernet Card

1x IDE 2.5" HDD

The blue AGP card is a Gigabyte TNT2 M64 (product page: GA-622 Overview | Graphics Card - GIGABYTE Global ), with the other AGP card not enough to identify however I'd say its probably some form of FX 5200 or FX 5500 - if the memory chips weren't so unusual and it didn't have the feature connector.

[iHardware Shelden]

On 4/18/2023 at 7:15 PM, da na said:

Been a while since I posted something substantial here so here we go!

Recently repasted and cleaned my Latitude D531, similar to the D530 but on an AMD platform instead of Core 2 Duo. The Turion 64 chips are Athlon 64 architecture based and have quite long dies. The Turion chips perform similarly to a Core 2 Duo of 400mhz lower core clock.

 

Personally the most interesting aspect of the machine for me is the Hynix ram module soldered to the motherboard below the chipset and above that big ribbon cable. This is part of the VRAM. It is a 256mb chip of which the GPU can directly access 160mb, the rest of this memory is used for streaming memory in and out of system memory for the GPU to use. This combination of discrete SRAM and shared memory benefits the GPU in speed since it still has its own memory, but allows lower cost higher capacity VRAM. If the GPU in the chipset, Xpress 1270, didnt suck, it would be interesting to use.

 

I have an HP Compaq 6515b with a Turion II x2 chip in it, I don't remember the exact one but I love that little chip. I remember when Windows 10 came out and once I got past the unsupported video drivers with some custom ones it was a great little machine. Used it all through highschool and found it recently. I will say they do run hot.

[ApolloX75]

I built a thing!

 

Spoiler

That is now my dedicated solder/rework/reflow station. I am currently working on replacing LGA sockets and it's actually not as hard as I was expecting. The hot plate makes things MUCH easier.

 

I'm no carpenter. But I can attach things with screws and cut holes in stuff. So win/win.

[SortaNew2This79]

Paid 30 bucks for this ole girl she runs great

[SimplyChunk]

Just picked up an old Dell Precision T3400 don't know what shape it's in yet but a quick Google tells me it'll be a socket 775 something

Aware that's not a great pic just yet but I'm at work at the mo

[jm_bmw]

This was my first GPU/PC back in 2006
P4 Prescott 3.2Ghz with a Intel D915PGN in a XBlade chassis

 

Pixelview Geforce 6200 256mb/128bit PCIE golden heatsink, it was flawless compared to the FX5200 in the cyber-cafes/lan-houses, could play CS1.6, D2, NFS, GTASA and on with max settings

 

This brand had a 256/128 sticker over the original 128/64 printed in the box, thought the guy in the store tricked us but it was indeed the 256mb version. Good times...

 

 

 

 

[SimplyChunk]

It may have a Quad in it